Urbangram has A Short History of Intersection
"The Egyptian symbol for 'city', Richard Sennett points out in Conscience of the Eye (p. 46), consisted of a cross bounded by a circle, providing one of the earliest signs of the urban; intersection and enclosure -- grid and boundary -- come together in this hieroglyph. The notion of the urban as an intersection offers an insight into one of the longest-running themes in urbanism - centrality. Whilst Egyptians made a point of right-angled street intersections, the Roman grid plan (Hippodamus) was designed to explicitly generate centers at different scales, with the earliest phase of settlement locating itself at the intersection of two prominent axial streets, the cardo and the decumanus. To this day cores, hubs, and centers form ever-present concepts in urban discourse; all relate or allude to a set of slippery spatial phenomena we call 'centrality'." ...
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